The Morphosyntax of Transitions

The Morphosyntax of Transitions PDF

Author: Víctor Acedo-Matellán

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0198733283

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This work examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state. It is based on the idea that languages encode information either on the verb or on a non-verbal element such as an affix or preposition. It focuses principally on Latin, with important comparisons drawn with other language families, particularly Slavic.

The Morphosyntax of Transitions

The Morphosyntax of Transitions PDF

Author: Víctor Acedo-Matellán

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780191797804

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This work examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state. It is based on the idea that languages encode information either on the verb or on a non-verbal element such as an affix or preposition. It focuses principally on Latin, with important comparisons drawn with other language families, particularly Slavic.

The Morphosyntax of Transitions

The Morphosyntax of Transitions PDF

Author: Víctor Acedo-Matellán

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-02-18

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0191047945

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This book examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state, taking as a starting point Talmy's typological generalization that classifies languages as either 'satellite-framed' or 'verb-framed'. In verb-framed languages, such as those of the Romance family, the result state or location is encoded in the verb. In satellite-framed languages, such as English or Latin, the result state or location is encoded in a non-verbal element. These languages can be further subdivided into weak satellite-framed languages, in which the element expressing result must form a word with the verb, and strong satellite-framed languages, in which it is expressed by an independent element: an adjective, a prepositional phrase or a particle. In this volume, Víctor Acedo-Matellán explores the similarities between Latin and Slavic in their expression of events of transition: neither allows the expression of complex adjectival resultative constructions and both express the result state or location of a complex transition through prefixes. They are therefore analysed as weak satellite-framed languages, along with Ancient Greek and some varieties of Mandarin Chinese, and stand in contrast to strong satellite-framed languages such as English, the Germanic languages in general, and Finno-Ugric. This variation is expressed in terms of the morphological properties of the head that expresses transition, which is argued to be affixal in weak but not in strong satellite-framed languages. The author takes a neo-constructionist approach to argument structure, which accounts for the verbal elasticity shown by Latin, and a Distributed Morphology approach to the syntax-morphology interface.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology PDF

Author: Antonio Fábregas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 857

ISBN-13: 1000371603

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The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology presents a state-of-the-art, detailed and exhaustive overview of all aspects of Spanish morphology, paying equal attention to the empirical complexities of the morphological system and the theoretical issues that they raise. As such, this handbook is relevant both for those interested in the facts of Spanish morphology and those interested in general morphology that want to explore how the Spanish facts illuminate our understanding of human language and current theories of morphology. This volume is also unique in its extent and coverage. Written by an international team of leading experts in the field, it contains 42 chapters divided into four sections, covering all synchronic and diachronic aspects of Spanish morphology, including inflection; derivation; compounding and other processes of word formation; the interaction of morphology with other modules of grammar and the role of morphology in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language teaching.

Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation

Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation PDF

Author: Itamar Francez

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0198744587

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Explores why different languages have systematically different ways of saying the same thing. It focuses on adjectival predication and shows that systematic differences in the meaning of words expressing adjectival notions have systematic effects on the form of the sentences they appear in

The Grammar of Expressivity

The Grammar of Expressivity PDF

Author: Daniel Gutzmann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-10

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0192540165

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This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker. While the expressive function of natural language has been widely studied in recent years, the role that grammar plays in the interpretation of expressive items has been largely neglected in the semantic and pragmatic literature. Daniel Gutzmann demonstrates that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of these utterances, and argues that expressivity is in fact a syntactic feature on a par with other established features such as tense and gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies of expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives; their puzzling properties are accounted for through a minimalist approach to syntactic features and agreement, which shows that expressivity can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and be selected for syntactically. The analysis not only supports the hypothesis of expressive syntax, but also highlights the hidden role that grammar may play in phenomena that are traditionally considered to be solely semantic in nature.

The Grammar of the Utterance

The Grammar of the Utterance PDF

Author: Alice Corr

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0198856598

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"This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with utterance-oriented elements such as vocatives, interjections, and particles; and to what they do with illocutionary complementisers, items attested cross-linguistically which look like, but do not behave like, subordinators. Taking the behaviour of conversation-oriented units of language as a window into the indexical nature of language, it argues that these items provide insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer-i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside-, the book's empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the architecture of grammar is also the architecture of thought. The book thus brings together the recent flurry of work seeking to incorporate aspects of the context of the utterance into the syntax, a line of enquiry broadly founded on empirical considerations, with the pursuit of explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalises the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. The book brings new insight to the comparative morphosyntax of (Ibero-)Romance, particularly in its diatopic, diastrastic, and diamesic dimensions, and showcases the utility of careful descriptive work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organisation of grammar"--

Encoding Events

Encoding Events PDF

Author: Xuhui Hu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 019253596X

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This volume presents theoretical and empirical research on the syntax of events within the broader framework of generative grammar, focusing on the central question of how conceptual meaning interacts with narrow syntactic computation. Xuhui Hu proposes a set of integration conditions that require the content of the predicate to be licensed by theta-role information generated by narrow syntax. The other principal theoretical component of the book concerns the functional structure of events, which is related to issues such as the parallel between the event and nominal domains, the mapping of a predicate onto an entity, and the grammatical foundation of verb classification. The framework is applied to three areas: the syntax of resultatives in English and Chinese, cross-linguistic and diachronic variation in resultatives, and applicative constructions. The findings shed light on the thematic relationship between core arguments and predicates and on the syntax of non-core arguments, contribute to the theory of parametric variation in the generative tradition, and provide insights into the verb-framed vs satellite-framed typology

The Derivational Timing of Ellipsis

The Derivational Timing of Ellipsis PDF

Author: Güliz Güneş

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-03-07

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0192589296

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This volume explores the nature of ellipsis, the core phenomenon that results in various types of omission in sentences. The chapters adopt the popular 'silent structure' accounts of ellipsis, and investigate the question of when linguistic material becomes silenced during the derivation and realization of syntactic structure. The book begins with a detailed introduction from the editors that outlines the current generative syntactic approaches to the derivational timing of ellipsis. In the chapters that follow, internationally-recognized experts in the field address key topics including structure building, the architecture of grammar, the interaction of distinct modules with syntax, the order of operations in the post-syntactic component, and constraints on binding relations. The authors also present novel arguments for and against the derivational approaches to ellipsis, the licensing of ellipsis, and phonological constraints on elliptical sentences. The findings, based on data from English and other languages such as Armenian, Italo-Romance, Ossetic, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish, facilitate a deeper understanding of the interaction between syntax and the neighbouring modules in the formation of elliptical utterances.

Definiteness in Balkan Romance

Definiteness in Balkan Romance PDF

Author: Daniela Isac

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0192635204

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This book is a study of the micro-variation in the realization of definiteness across languages belonging to the Balkan Romance family: Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, and Megleno-Romanian. The definite article is a suffix in all of these languages, but nominal constituents show considerable variation with respect to the overt realization of the definite article: in some instances, the definite article is spelled out only once, in other situations it is spelled out multiple times, and in still other cases it can be phonologically null. Daniela Isac offers a unified analysis of these options based on a post-syntactic spell-out rule that specifies the conditions under which the definite article can be pronounced on various heads within the nominal constituent. Micro-variation in the patterns displayed by specific languages in this family is accounted for exclusively by lexicon-related differences (the feature specification of lexical and functional items may vary across languages) and by differences related to externalization (syntactic relations such as Agree may have various morpho-phonological overt expressions across languages). Crucially, the computational system is assumed to be invariant, a result that is consistent with the generative understanding of the knowledge and acquisition of language.